Technologies associated with mobile terminals are being rapidly developed and standardized, and such technologies are increasing transmissions and receptions of various contents among mobile terminals and network entities.
According to recent standardization documents of Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a content identity manager (CIM) can be provided to identify various contents associated with services.
Generally, a CIM, which is a network entity, generates content IDs for contents associated with terminals or services. The CIM can provide a content ID assigned to a specific content to a terminal, at the request of the terminal or according to the network settings (e.g., when a new content is received by the CIM).
As more users use their terminals and mobile services, more contents are being exchanged in a network. However, some of these contents are spams which should not be exchanged in the network. As a result, it is important and desirable to correctly identify spams, among various contents, and to process the spams appropriately.
According to a related art, each terminal user can decide if a content is a spam based on the sender of the content or by the content itself. Once the terminal user indicates to the CIM that the contents from such a sender are spams, the CIM blocks the contents in the network so that the indicated spam contents are no longer transmitted or exchanged in the network.
This, however, creates a limitation in that once one user has decided that a particular content is a spam based on the sender, that content is blocked by the CIM for all other users and subsequent use. But what may be considered a spam to one user may not necessarily be considered a spam to another user. Thus allowing one user to decide that a content is a spam for all other users and for all future use is too restrictive, and limits exchange of actually desired contents for some users unnecessarily and without their knowledge.